Application Insights Deep Dive Part 2 - Building A Demo Server

In Part 1 of this series, I gave an overview of what Application Insights was and walked through configuring a new Visual Studio Online account, before then activating the Application Insights capability inside the same account. In this post, I’ll assume you don’t have an existing .NET web application to test your new Application Insights capabilities on and will walk through deploying a demo server which will be used to host a new web application environment to use and highlight the Application Insight features.

Creating Your Demo Web Server

For the purpose of this blog series, I’m going to create my demo web server VM in Windows Azure. If you already have a demo web server ready to go, then you can skip over this section as you wish.

Follow these steps to create a new Windows Azure virtual machine:

Open the Windows Azure portal and logon with your Microsoft Account credentials.

Click the ‘New’ button at the bottom of the screen, highlight, Compute\Virtual Machine, then click on the 'From Gallery' option as shown below.

Choose the type of image that you want to deploy to your virtual machine (we’ll use Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter), then hit the Arrow button down the bottom-right hand side of the page to move on.

Enter a name for your demo VM as well as a username and password, then click the arrow button down the bottom-right hand side to move on.

At the Virtual Machine Configuration screen, make whatever changes you need, then hit the arrow down the bottom-right again to move on to the final page.

From the final screen, you will need to configure your endpoints to allow communication between the web application and your Application Insights environment. If you don’t have an existing .NET web application to test with and you will be following the steps later in this post to create one, then here’s the endpoint you need to add:
 

Name	Protocol	Public Port	Private Port
FFProd	TCP	1337	1337

After entering this endpoint, you should have a screen like this

Now hit the checkmark at the bottom to complete the configuration of your VM and kick off the provisioning and build.

When your VM has been created and is up and running, click the Connect button at the bottom of the Virtual Machines page as shown.

Accept any warning messages that appear and click Connect again from the RDP session window to logon to your new VM.

When you’re logged into the VM, add the following two firewall rules using PowerShell:

New-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName FabrikamFiberProduction -Action Allow -Direction Inbound -LocalPort 1337 -Profile Any -Protocol TCP -RemotePort Any
 
New-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName WebDeploy -Action Allow -Direction Inbound -LocalPort 8080 -Profile Any -Protocol TCP -RemotePort Any

With the firewall rules now added, you've got your demo web server up and running in Windows Azure and ready for the deployment of your .NET web application - which we will deploy in Part 3.